News — If you like maybe watching, reading, or learning about pretty, colorful birds, you’re not alone. But it turns out that love for the bright and beautiful is impacting scientific study and limiting what we know about how their drab counterparts impact our ecology, which could ultimately affect conservation efforts for less striking birds.
In the newly published study, “,” a team of researchers studied nearly 300 North American species of passerines and near-passerines. Cornell College Assistant Professor of Biology Joshua Otten, listed as an author alongside his friend and lead author Silas Fischer, says passerines are your typical songbirds, such as blue jays, swallows, and warblers.
“Through our work, we started to realize there was this inequity with certain species getting studied a lot and certain ones that didn’t,” Otten said. “This study really highlights scientific research and conservation efforts where a lot of money is spent on the flashier species.”
The team compiled more than 27,000 peer-reviewed, published papers on these birds that breed in the U.S. and Canada. Then, they took the big data set and removed any papers dealing with more than 3 species or papers outside of the biological sciences. They developed a scoring system for how pretty the birds are, based on other published research. They also calculated the breeding range size of each species and how many colleges or universities were within that range, to determine if species that were more familiar and accessible were studied more often.
Their findings confirmed a strong bias toward the prettier birds, or those with greater “aesthetic salience,” and those that were more familiar and accessible to biologists.
According to the study, birds in the top 10% of aesthetic salience were studied three times more than birds in the bottom 10%. Birds in the top 10% of breeding range size and university abundance were studied 3.8X and 3.5X more often than species in the bottom 10% of those categories, respectively. The 5 species with the most papers were tree swallow (Tachycineta bicolor; n = 597), red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus; n = 499), song sparrow (Melospiza melodia; n = 469), white-crowned sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys; n = 465), and black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus; n = 444).
“With science, we’re always trying to build upon what was previously known, create this bigger data set to see these trends,” Otten said. “Understanding that humans have this bias will hopefully help to show that we should focus on some of these understudied species to learn more about their ecology.”
The authors note that their findings highlight how a lack of research on drab birds could have an impact on their conservation efforts, where the more-often-studied birds may receive more conservation dollars because that’s what the public relates to and enjoys seeing. Otten said journals also often tend to publish cover images with beautiful bird pictures, which can make it harder to publish articles about the duller feathered friends.
According to the paper, there are other studies about how more aesthetically pleasing fish and plants receive more research attention but this study is among the first to address birds. The researchers found a handful of birds that had zero studies and Otten said those overlooked birds could be so much more than what we give them credit for.
“With ecology, everything is connected and you start to really understand the importance of all of these connections,” Otten said. “I like to tell my students to celebrate the ugly things and that studying and knowing different species makes us more unique and interesting. I hope my students always realize that even if somebody thinks something is boring if they don’t find it boring—they should follow that passion or interest. All scientific inquiry is important and holds value, contributing to the body of knowledge that helps us better understand the world around us.”
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